I’m going to need some time to process today’s news that Prince Rogers Nelson has passed away. Not unlike David Bowie, Prince was one of those artists so otherworldly that the very concept they could be mortal is almost beyond belief.

While I’m sure at some point I’ll find the time/space to write something more thorough, here’s something I had on-hand that speaks to what Prince has meant — both to me and to music. Back in 2014, my friends with the Halifax Thrillema film series hosted a 20th anniversary screening of Purple Rain and graciously allowed me to introduce the film.

Here’s what I had to say:

Dearly beloved…

Both Purple Rain the album and Purple Rain the film begin with a sermon. The album ends, and the film climaxes, with a hymn — one of rock’s greatest, drenched in the spiritual power of reverb. In between, things get sexy, things get awkward, things get very, very purple.

Tom Ewing, one of my favorite pop critics, has written about the idea of an “imperial phase”: a short-lived, accelerated time in a career in which an artist seizes authority over a cultural moment. Ewing suggests Prince’s imperial phase might be among the longest in popular music, and he has a point. From Dirty Mind in 1980 through to arguably the Batman soundtrack in 1989, no one produced more great music than Prince Rogers Nelson — not Michael Jackson, not Madonna, no one. But if Prince had an imperial moment, a singular time in which his cultural reach was at its most concentrated, it’s Purple Rain. We could even narrow that moment down further to the first week of August, 1984, when Prince claimed number one album, the number one single and the number one movie in America.

Purple Rain ended 1984 as the ninth-highest-grossing film of the year, making back its budget nearly 10 times over — not bad for a project that nearly everyone not named Prince doubted at one point or another. It’s easy to forget now, but Prince was no pop icon before Purple Rain. He’d only just cracked the Top 10 for the first time in 1982 with “Little Red Corvette” when he demanded a feature film deal as a condition of resigning with his management company. Hubris and confidence had gotten Prince this far; why not go all-in?

The first draft of the film’s script was written by William Blynn, showrunner of the TV series Fame, before being rewritten by first-time director Albert Magnoli. The story is autobiographical in spirit, if not in detail, and is based around a competition between Prince’s “the Kid” and rival band Morris Day and the Time. In reality The Time, like Appolina 6 (and Vanity 6 before them) was a glorified side-project, with Prince writing all the music, performing all the parts and dictating all creative decisions. Some of the tension on-screen, though, is likely quite real: Prince had recently fired Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis from the Time (the duo became hitmakers with Janet Jackson thereafter) and Morris Day ended up quitting shortly after the movie’s release over his disagreements with Prince. That’s a somewhat disappointing exit for a man who, some have argued, outperforms Prince in his own movie (off-stage, at the very least).

At the core of the film, of course, are its songs. As an album, Purple Rain is perhaps Prince’s greatest achievement: nine incredible tracks, no filler, a summary statement of everything that made him one of the defining artists of his or any era. Several of the songs were actually recorded live in front of an audience at the real life First Avenue club in Minneapolis. (If you know where to look on the Internet, you can find raw video of the title track — several minutes longer and lacking a few overdubs, but otherwise as-is on the record — and you can almost feel the energy flowing out of the song.) With four top-10 singles, including number one smash “When Doves Cry,” Purple Rain sold more than 20 million copies worldwide and stayed atop the Billboard album chart for an incredible 24 straight weeks. It also has the distinction of being the last recipient of the Academy Award for “Best Original Song Score” before the category was effectively discontinued.

So Purple Rain, the album, is an inarguable classic, deserving of its prominent place on most lists of the greatest albums ever made. In contrast, whether Purple Rain the film is even just “good” is actually an open question. It’s certainly a great deal better than Prince’s other films, which he directed and should only be viewed by the morbidly curious superfan. It’s been accused of misogyny, and certainly its portrayal of women problematic. I will say this about Purple Rain, though: it’s an endearingly earnest movie. Even when it strains belief, Purple Rain believes in itself, and does so with such force that it propels you through every awkward moment, every stilted performance until you’re once again back up onstage at the fictionalized First Avenue with the Revolution.

And it’s there, as you might expect, where Purple Rain becomes something transcendent. Simply put, what you’re about to witness are some of the greatest rock performances ever put to film. They ooze sex, danger, passion, urgency. And though they benefit a great deal from their cinematography, lighting and editing, in many ways they’re the real deal: none of them took more than two or three takes to film. Prince simply wouldn’t allow any more and, it turns out, didn’t need any more. According to Magnoli, Prince hit his marks every take.

And that hints at what makes Purple Rain so special. Most great music films are trying to capture a musical moment after the fact. Even A Hard Day’s Night (arguably the most zeitgeist-y music movie ever made) feels like an attempt to quickly capitalize and expand on a moment just as it’s breaking. Purple Rain, in contrast, is a musical moment — Prince’s imperial moment — being created right in front of our eyes. And while not everyone around him may quite realize what’s happening, the man in the middle of it all — the man hitting all his marks; the man with the cool purple coat and the badass motorcycle; the man who knows the geographic location of Lake Minnetonka — Prince knows.

Not to be too morbid or anything, but isn’t that what milestones are about, at their core?

We shower birthdays and anniversaries with generic celebration terms — about “marking the past year,” as an excuse to get together with friends and family — but the cause that’s being celebrated is, essentially, survival. They’re a chance to take stock of how far we’ve come since the last milestone, how we got there and, sometimes, who might have been lost along the way. And at their best, they’re about the future: a chance to connect with important people in our lives and find all the right reasons to keep pushing on through the next 365 days.

“I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.”

That lyric is, of course, the most famous chorus that the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle has ever written. The song it’s taken from, “This Year,” closed out the Goats’ performance at Merge 25 last Friday night before a sold-out crowd at Carborro, North Carolina’s famous Cats Cradle club. It followed a set I would have readily watched for hours, with material spanning a good portion of Darnielle’s career as a songwriter — from Tallahassee‘s “Game Shows Touch Our Lives” to Transcendental Youth‘s “Amy AKA Spent Gladiator 1.” The set’s best moment, though, may have been the jaw-droppingly great take “Who You Are” by American Music Club, a Merge artist not at the label’s 25th anniversary celebration. You can hear the band’s take on the song from the Google Play/Merge collection online, and in the room you could have heard a pin drop. It was an imposing, inspiring presence — Darnielle — paying tribute to a notable absence.

American Music Club weren’t the only major Merge act not in North Carolina last week: Arcade Fire and recent Merge departees Spoon weren’t there either, nor were Archers of Loaf, and the Magnetic Fields’ Stephen Merritt is playing a solo show the week after the fest in nearby Durham rather than being directly a part of it. (That said, the Vertical Scratchers did offer up a charmingly loud cover of Merritt’s “I Don’t Want to Get Over You” on Saturday.) But it’s a testament to the Merge’s immaculate, curatorial taste over the past quarter century that these absences were only noted when someone else drew attention to them. The rest of the time, Merge 25 felt deeply, immediately present.

Over the course of four days and nights — two evenings at the Cat’s Cradle, one at Duke’s Badwin Auditorium and an outdoor festival in the Cradle’s parking lot on Saturday — I got to see 25 different Merge bands perform, and only a couple of the sets warranted a disinterested “meh” from me. Most would have been highlights at any other festival: a rare North American performance by Lampchop, playing 2000’s Nixon song by song; Destroyer’s first full-band set in two years, debuting several awesome-sounding new tracks; the best set I’ve ever seen from Caribou; watching heroic veterans like Reigning Sound and Bob Mould show the kids how it’s done; watching upstarts like Telekinesis, Wye Oak and Mikal Cronin play like the heroic veterans they’ll one day become; discovering local talents with huge potential like Hiss Golden Messenger and Mount Moriah.

None of the performances felt like nostalgia sets (with one exception, which I’ll get to in a bit). Nearly all the bands played new or recent material, often right alongside their minor or major classics. For a band like Teenage Fanclub, whose flawless Saturday afternoon set may have been the best of the weekend, that meant songs like 2010’s “When I Still Have Thee” alongside by iconic tracks like “The Concept” and “Everything Flows.” Similarly, the lineup offered the chance to see bands that had been around for decades alongside an act like opening night after-party headliners Flesh Wounds, a rowdy Stooges-esque punk group who have a single 7-inch out on Merge and whose members I later met working at local record stores and bars.

Old, new, and everything in between, all worthy of celebration. And why not? Against all the music industry odds, Merge Records is still here.

Four years ago I attended Matador at 21 in Las Vegas, which on the surface seems like a similar affair to Merge 25: an indie label celebrating a key milestone (in Matador’s case, cheekily heading to Vegas at the US drinking age) with a stacked roster of its greatest bands. Matador 21 was, also, quite possibly the best lineup of talent I’ll ever see at a music festival. Its poster hangs framed on my entryway wall, showing it off to everyone who visits my home: I was there.

Matador 21’s vibe was totally different from Merge 25, though, and not just because of the cool/weird “hipsters take over a casino” experience. Two of the festival’s four biggest bands, Pavement and Guided By Voices, were reunions (although the latter has kept recording and performing since) and, though we didn’t know it yet, a third (Sonic Youth) would break up just about a year later. The lineup was filled with other rare or one-time-only performances, and even an artist who’s still something of an ongoing concern like Liz Phair stuck with old hits from her critical heyday. Newer acts like Ted Leo and Fucked Up did their best to fight for currency, but their late-night battle of the bands (a highlight) also spent most of its time diving through the history of punk music.

Don’t get me wrong: it was an amazing experience, maybe my favourite festival ever. As someone who was too young or too uncool for much of 1990s indie rock in its prime, Matador 21 was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see so many bands I’d missed out on, as well as get a crash course in the ones I didn’t know. But the further I get from that weird, wonderful weekend, the more the whole experience feels more and more like a strange time machine of sorts.

Or, if you will, a tomb.

I know, I know, I’m bringing up death again — but I’m not the only one thinking about it.

Superchunk is the band that started Merge in the first place, and whose members Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballace remain its bosses until this day. If you were to make a case for the most underrated band of the ’90s, you could do a lot worse than Superchunk, who released seven great-to-amazing albums over the course of a decade but never managed a breakthrough hit; their best-known song (“Slack Motherfucker”) was too profane, and attempts to push tracks like “Hyper Enough” to radio stalled. But unlike their peers who played the break-up/make-up game, Superchunk never really went away: after 2001’s Here’s to Shutting Up, they played sporadically through the 2000s, recorded a few small projects here and there and, with 2010’s Majesty Shredding, picked up right where they left off. The only thing surprising about the album was just how great it was.

Last year’s I Hate Music is even better, though I didn’t think so the first time I heard it. It lacked Shredding‘s “holy shit, how is this comeback record so good?” novelty, and it’s not as catchy an album either. But I’ve kept coming back to I Hate Music over and over the past year, to the point where I’d now consider it my favourite Superchunk album, hands down. The album’s power comes from the fact that it’s all about death: nearly every song touches upon absence, in some way, often in blunt, brutal fashion, but delivered with Superchunk’s classic “it sucks but we’re still singing along” attitude. It opens with McCaughan singing, “Everything the dead don’t know piles up like magazines, overflows” and closes with “every day I want to ask you, but I can’t ask you…what can we do?” The album’s title is taken from the song “Me & You & Jackie Mitto,” which finds McCaughan turning even against his greatest love: “I hate music, what it is worth? Can’t bring anyone back to this earth, or fill in the space between all of the notes, but I’ve got nothing else so I guess here we go…”

Here we go, indeed: Superchunk closed out Merge 25’s second night with a most worthy headlining set, one that played to so many of the band’s punish strengths (and included a great cover of Sebdoah’s “Brand New Love”). But, fun as it was, I was struck most by I Hate Music songs like “Low F” or similarly sad, powerful songs like 2012 single “This Summer.” They’re still anthems, but they ache with age, absence and the best, most wistful sort of nostalgia. Near the end of the main set, McCaughan stopped to note who was there — and who wasn’t. He meant, in one sense, Ballace, who wasn’t on stage due to a hearing condition that’s kept her from playing live with the band. But he may also have been referring to long-time friend Dave Doernberg, who passed away in 2012 and presumably inspired a great many of the songs on I Hate Music. But then McCaughan turned the speech into an impassioned plea for living in the moment: “We’re only 25,” he said, of his label. “We’re still young… we can still make bad decisions.”

I wasn’t taking notes, but if he also said “we’re still here,” it wouldn’t have surprised me one bit.

Superchunk weren’t Merge 25’s ultimate headliners, though. That honour went to a band whose mere presence at such a festival would have been a total shock just a few years ago, but which now seemed rather ordinary.

Jeff Mangum, after all, used to be indie rock’s J.D. Salinger, its most infamous recluse. His disappearance immediately after the release of his masterpiece, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, is the stuff of legend. For more than a decade, fans like me wondered where he might be; hell, my own home province, Nova Scotia was one of the locales where he was rumoured to be resting his head during his 12-year absence. Now, there’s no rumours, no wondering: following a two-year series of solo tours, he’s now reunited with the full Neutral Milk Hotel lineup and playing nearly all of the big gigs on the festival circuit. There’s no new material to perform, no real surprises — simply the classics from Aeroplane and On Avery Island, with a couple of b-sides for good measure.

Few bands have been as defined by absence as Neutral Milk Hotel, and not just because of Mangum’s disappearance. Their best songs feel deeply haunted, with the past and present blurring together in an abstract, physical, sexual haze. Aeroplane is famously shaped around the story of Anne Frank, whose tale deeply moved Mangum and informs a great number of the album’s songs. Their best performances at Merge 25 played to this ghostly sensibility: a powerful “Oh Comely,” a beautifully unsettling “Little Birds.”

But unlike Mangum’s solo performances, which felt like spiritual experiences, this was a noisy, rollicking affair, where the presence of a real, live band often hurt his haunted songs more than it helped. Neutral Milk Hotel’s drummer is (to put it politely) sporadic in his tempos, often missing beats and speeding and slowing songs without warning, and the rest of the band often opts for a kitchen-sink approach to sound. It was fuzzy, immediate but instead of some semblance of order, chaos reigned. This, admittedly, has always been the case — the band was legendarily messy live in the 1990s as well — but it’s in marked contrast to the sound precision that marks Mangum’s recordings, the way most of us have experienced these songs over the years.

But at least he was there. All around the Cat’s Cradle parking lot, rapturous fans had the opportunity to sing along to their favourite songs with a singer, and a band, who many thought they’d never get to see in person. The man of absence had become a man of presence. And like everyone else, he saluted the label who helped make it all possible: “Seriously, a record label can really fuck you,” said Mangum. “Merge doesn’t want to fuck you. They’ve been such a good home for us all these years.”

The week was a giant Merge love-fest, and why wouldn’t it be? The label’s track record in picking bands remains top-shelf but, just as importantly, they made everyone feel like home for the week — even those of us who don’t have a record deal. From supporting the fan-organized kickball tournament (which my team won via a tiebreaking rock/paper/scissors); to selecting vendors offering cheap beer and free (free!) iced coffee; to providing one of the most comfortable, laid-back atmospheres possible at a festival; to Ballance personally wandering the parking lot at the outdoor show, handing out earplugs in full-on “Merge mom” mode; to McCaughan standing there at the front of nearly every show in full-on fan mode — Merge made everyone feel immensely welcome, immediate and present. It was like we were celebrating not just Merge’s relationship with indie rock, but our own: the bands who’ve found their way into our lives and who are still fighting and earning their presence within it.

They’re still here. We’re still here.

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Why do we care about the song of the summer?

Okay, perhaps you don’t, but a certain class of music geeks do, with everyone from Vulture to even Shazam trying to figure out which songs will define the season.

In part, I’m sure it comes from the same part of the musical brain that’s attracted to lists and rankings: the thrill of artificial competition, of creating things to root for (or against). But it’s also that even for a cold soul like mine, there’s something special about music in the summer — in having a common, shared soundtrack that floats through the season’s beach visits, road trips, weddings and patio hangouts.

And “shared” is the key word there: one of the things I find so compelling about our current pop age is that even though our digital lives give us more power that ever before to listen to whatever we want, whenever we want, we’re still drawn to shared experiences in our pop songs. Some of this drive is economic, sure, and some of it is based in the enduring power of certain distribution systems, but pop music as a social experience isn’t only surviving in the digital age: it’s thriving.

So what exactly defines “song of the summer” (SOTS), then?

It’s the one pop song that eclipses the rest in terms of social impact: radio play, chart performance, cultural ubiquity. The eventual champion is rarely the season’s “best” pop song, but it’s typically its most effective one. Past SOTS winners — “I Gotta Feeling,” “Call Me Maybe,” “California Gurls,” “Umbrella,” “Crazy in Love” — offer a sense of what we expect from our summer songs: big hooks, singalong potential, crossover appeal, the sort of track you might hear blasting out of a car radio as it drives by, a few km/h too fast, on a hot summer night. And lest you think it’s too early to handicap the 2014 champion, every SOTS for the past 20 years has been released before the end of May, sometimes even months earlier.

Last year’s SOTS sweepstakes was a dead-heat between two Pharrell jams, “Blurred Lines” and “Get Lucky,” with the former ultimately (disappointingly) emerging as the slight victor. Who’ll take the crown this year? Here’s my take on the competitors:

The Maybes

Paramore: “Ain’t it Fun”

Paramore’s self-titled album was one of my favourite albums of 2013, and while “Ain’t It Fun” is a solid track, I never would have envisioned it as a hit. Yet, here we are: buoyed by radio play, the song made it to the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. As great as that gospel choir backing is, I doubt the song is going to end up going that much higher: in 2014, even the pop-iest rock has its chart limits.

Röyksopp & Robyn: “Do It Again”

The collaboration EP between Röyksopp and Robyn is a going to be one of my summer soundtracks, for sure, but most of its better moments are slow-building and hardly chart-topping material. The title track is the one exception, but I confess that I don’t exactly hear it becoming a sensation on a SOTS level.

Tiesto: “Red Lights”; Calvin Harris “Summer”

Here we have songs by two of the behemoths of modern EDM — a genre which, based on tracks like “Wake Me Up” and “Don’t You Worry Child,” can clearly deliver big pop hits. Yet there’s something lacking in both of these entries. “Summer” has been Harris’ fastest rising single on the charts, which I can only suspect is entirely due to the song’s name: the track itself falls flat, and is a far cry from his super catchy hits like “I Need Your Love” and “Sweet Nothings.” Tiesto’s “Red Lights” is better in the hook department but it still feels underwhelming and uninspired. A SOTS needs to act as a soundtrack to summertime, but it also needs to survive on its own terms, which “Red Lights” really doesn’t.

Michael Jackson ft. Justin Timberlake: “Love Never Felt So Good”

The best track from the shockingly-not-embarrassing posthumous MJ collection fits perfectly amongst the current retro disco throwback trend… except that the track is the genuine article, recorded originally in the early 1980s and updated with a vocal from current “King of Pop” contender Timberlake. But solid through the song is, does MJ’s clout extend so far beyond the grave that we’ll suddenly make this THE song of the summer? Unlikely.

Clean Bandit ft. Jess Glynne: “Rather Be”

Haven’t heard this one yet? If you’re in North America, you’re not alone — but you’re increasingly an outlier. The song by British electronic group Clean Bandit was the fastest selling single of the year in the UK, and has reached number one on charts in 15 different countries so far this year. It’s an effortlessly catchy, consumable pop song that I have little doubt could (and probably will) become a hit in North America. But can do it so in time to be the SOTS? Flatted though the world may seem, the path for European pop hits to crash the Western Hemisphere remains long and slow: remember “Lights”? “Bulletproof”? “I Love It”? If “Rather Be” does take off, it’ll almost certainly along those songs’ pace, meaning it’ll be too late for it to make a run at the SOTS title.

John Legend: “All of Me”

Currently, Legend’s ballad sits atop the Billboard Hot 100 as the most popular song in America, the latest in a surprisingly long line of recent solo piano hits (“Stay,” “Someone Like You,” etc.). Just like with summer movies, there’s a place for this sort of counterprogramming on the pop charts, but can you really picture this song passing the SOTS car stereo test? Didn’t think so.

Nikki Minaj: “Pills n Potions”

This one’s hot off the presses — it was only released last Wednesday — and it’s a much stronger ballad contender for the SOTS than “All Of Me,” despite the latter’s current chart success, thanks to that great “I still love” chorus. It suffers from the same problem, though: a ballad as this year’s SOTS winner? Given the quality tracks higher up on this list, seems very unlikely.

5 Seconds of Summer: “She Looks So Perfect”

It pains me to put this song in the “maybes” list: the song is a pop-punk gem with a dorky-annoying-then-suddenly-endearing chorus, and even a reference to escaping the confines of a small town. (Such references are pretty much my musical catnip.) Hell, the band even has “summer” in the name! Here’s the gigantic “however,” though: 5SOS are being marketed as a “boy band,” the next logical evolution of the rock-aping sound and pretty-boy image that One Direction have owned for the past couple of years. And in 2014, that’s a problem. The song may deserve success on its own terms, but it will likely struggle break out of the teen-pop ghetto that’s prevented similar acts from having massive, audience-spanning hits.

The Contenders

Coldplay ft. AVICI: “A Sky Full of Stars”

One of the key criteria for a SOTS winner is crossover appeal, so if any EDM track has a shot at the title, it’s probably the one with the mopey, lovey balladeers in tow. I’m not big on this track — it feels too calculated, too strategic, even by Coldplay’s standards — but it would be foolish to dismiss its potential. It’ll be a hit, and probably a big one (perhaps Coldplay’s biggest since “Viva La Vida”)… but probably not the SOTS.

Katy Perry: “Birthday”

“Birthday” is one of the better tracks from Prism (which isn’t saying much) but it’s mostly here a courtesy: with two separate SOTS winners to her name (“I Kissed A Girl” and then “California Gurls,” narrowly beating her own, superior “Teenage Dream”), Perry’s pop infrastructure is always ready to fight for the title. But “Birthday” sounds more like silly fun than a world-conquering beast of a pop song, and the fact that it’s the third single from her record means it’s not as new or novel as some of the other contenders.

DJ Snake ft. Lil’ Jon: “Turn Down For What”

Aided by its absolutely bonkers video, and Lil’ Jon’s predictably over-the-top yelling, “Turn Down for What” has become a massive hit for French DJ Snake. It’s pretty much meme-ready from the start, and in this day and age, having a hit that screams “Let’s make our own video and upload it to YouTube!” has lots of power. But the song’s ability to reach a broader audience is crippled by its harsh edges; it’s not the sort of song you could picture on mainstream pop radio, is it?

Nico & Vinz: “Am I Wrong”

Never underestimate Scandinavia’s pop potential. This song was a hit in Nico & Vinz’s home country of Norway last year, and the duo’s quest for the American pop charts was solidified when they changed their name from “Envy” to avoid confusion with similarly named US artists. The song is the sort of effervescent, scale-climbing pop song that, if it’s catchy (and, helpfully, if it sounds a bit exotic), often finds a place on the charts. It’s also familiar: seriously, just try singing along “Somebody I Used To Know” to this one. It fits perfectly. I’m ranking this as “contender” right now, but it could easily sneak into the heavyweight category if it picks up steam.

Pharrell Williams: “Happy” / “Come Get It Bae”

Timing isn’t the only thing when it comes to a SOTS winner, but it’s sure something. After helping craft both SOTS frontrunners last year, Pharrell comes out with “Happy” and it becomes 2014’s biggest hit by a mile (even if I’m not totally on board). It’s still at number four on the Hot 100; had it caught on even a few weeks later than it did it could easily have carried through to take the SOTS crown. But “Happy” simply peaked too early, and is in decline just as the SOTS sweepstakes heat up. Follow-up single “Come Get It Bae” — you know it from those Red Bull commercials — will certainly be a hit, but it feels a notch below a true SOTS heavyweight. After an incredible run of successes, it looks like Pharrell may fall just short of another SOTS win…

The Heavyweights

Ed Sheeran: “Sing

Hold on… “My god…that’s PHARRELL’S music!”*

What, you thought Pharrell would sit back and let SOTS go without a fight? Hardly — although his performer of choice is certainly a surprise. Ed Sheeran, acoustic guitar in hand, is best known for his teenage-girl-targeting ballads, from hit “The A-Team” to his Taylor Swift duet “Everything Has Changed.” The acoustic guitar is still there on “Sing,” but it’s chopped up, punctuated by a trademark Pharrell bassline and played underneath a Price-aping falsetto chorus.

Some have expressed polite dismay over Sheeran’s swerve towards P-pop (“Pharrell pop”; we might as well give it its own genre by now). But, in many ways, he’s an ideal candidate for this sort of play. He’s established enough to have a devoted fanbase keen to follow alone, but not so well established that such a swerve would alienate more people than it’ll attract. Plus, his “likeable ginger” image makes his delivery of this sort of hookup anthem decidedly more endearing and significantly less rape-y than “Blurred Lines.” It’s still early days for the song (its music video just came out), but don’t be surprised if it’s still standing come September as one of the season’s biggest hits.

*For those who didn’t grow up watching wrestling as a kid, anytime you see someone use “My god, that’s ______’s music” on the Internet, it refers to the way announcer Jim Ross used to get overly excited when a wrestler’s music would play and they’d head to the ring in a surprise-but-totally-expected interruption of proceedings.

Iggy Azalea ft. Charlie XCX: “Fancy”

Though it’s often criticized as being conservative, pop is always reacting against itself. Case in point: “Fancy,” the breakout single from Australian rapper Iggy Azaela, is basically an opposite-world rewrite of “Royals,” matching Lorde’s track in musical minimalism but, instead, celebrating maximalism. Iggy and Charlie may never be royals, but they sure can party like them.

It’s Charlie XCX who does the musical heavy lifting here, and I confess it’s a bit disappointing to see her once again giving away such a killer hook to another artist rather than keeping it for herself (she wrote “I Love It” for Icona Pop). But, frankly, the song doesn’t work without Iggy’s attitude; hell, the song is pretty much all attitude. That’s why it’s at number two on the pop charts right now, and why it’s going to eclipse pretty much every other song this summer. Everyone wants to feel like they can take on the world this time of year, and this’ll be the go-to soundtrack for casual badassery.

Ariana Grande ft. Iggy Azaela: “Problem”

It’s quite the feat to end up with your name attached to two different Song of the Summer frontrunners in the same year, and while Iggy’s accomplishment isn’t quite at the same level of Pharrell’s one-two punch last year, it’s impressive none-the-less (especially given that she’s an emerging artist). It matters little that her rap verse on “Problem” is underwhelming — just her presence is enough to solidify her claim to being the defining pop voice of summer 2014.

But Iggy will likely have to settle sharing the SOTS championship belt with the young lady who takes top billing on the colossal “Problem.” Ariana Grande flirted with mass appeal on last year’s “The Way,” but “Problem” seems perfectly assembled to make her a minor superstar, at least until the end of the summer: you’ve got that “wacky sax” hook that recalls recent hits like “Talk Dirty” and “Thrift Shop,” paired with a speaker-bursting synth riff in the verses and Grande’s ridiculous vocal climbs taking the listener higher and higher with each kiss-off line.

So why do I think “Problem” is this year’s most likely SOTS winner? One is crossover appeal: with its Mariah-style vocals, “Problem” has a lot more potential on pop radio than “Fancy,” meaning its ability to become, say, your mom or dad’s favourite song of the season is much greater. The other is timing: “Fancy” is hotter right now, but “Problem” is right on its heels (they’re number two and three on the Hot 100, respectively) and it’s been out for a much shorter period of time; its official music video isn’t even released yet. We may be looking at a replay of last summer’s “Pharrell-vs-Pharrell” contest, when “Get Lucky” was quicker out of the gate but “Blurred Lines” peaked during peak summer.

So if it’s an Iggy-vs-Iggy showdown this summer… Ariana Grande wins.

McNutt Against the Music Song of the Summer prediction: Ariana Grande ft. Iggy Azalea, “Problem”

Addenda

As if often the case with these things, readers and friends have suggested a few alternate songs that could (and perhaps should) have been on my list. A few other contenders to consider:

Chromeo: “Come Alive” or “Jealous”: Chromeo have been flirting with a pop breakout for a while now; will one of these two songs do the job? Fun though they are, I have my doubts.

The Chainsmokers: “#SELFIE”: There’s always a place for novelty pop in the summer, so don’t be surprised if this rather annoying track gets some momentum but it’s far too insufferable to be THE song of the summer.

Jennifer Lopez ft. French Montana: “I Luh Ya Papi”: This song has been out since March but it’s just entered the Hot 100. I don’t think it has legs but, hey, summer can surprise sometimes.

In different hands, “Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone” could have been a blockbuster.

Not that it’s not something magical on its own terms. The song, which was the first to be released from Lykke Li’s devastatingly great new album I Never Learn, is one of the year’s most arresting music moments so far. Stripped bare to guitar and a faint keyboard part, the track has an amateurish quality that renders the vocal performance uncomfortably intimate, as Li cries out for her jilted lover to fight through her emptiness and commit to something, anything, to break her out of stasis.

But in both the song’s melody and its vocals, you hear a quiet escalation each time the chorus hits — a cue that, based on pop expectations, the song should suddenly become much more massive. In your head, you can almost write in the parts that aren’t there: the booming drums, the pounding piano, the string crescendo. The song cries out for the “power ballad” treatment but never gives in to the temptation.

There’s nothing wrong with a great power ballad, and I’m not the only one to note the degree to which I Never Learn flirts with that formula. (The closest it comes is probably “Never Gonna Love Again,” which does welcome the string and drum accompaniment.) But I’m quite glad it doesn’t: to do so would have robbed I Never Learn of the particular quality that makes it one of my favourite albums of the year. By adding vocal and musical heft, a power ballad promises redemption: as bleak as this particular voice is at the moment, it can muster the strength to belt these feelings out, offering a sense of hope and possibility. In contrast, Li’s songs ring out in resignation — you get the feeling that she may never truly shake her sadness, and that the mistakes and regrets she bears from this broken relationship may follow her around until she runs out of footsteps to walk.

I Never Learn is heavy stuff, yet there’s still something inspiring about the experience of listening to the album. When “Love Me Like I’m Not Made Of Stone” was first released, I found myself pressing repeat over and over like it was a hot new pop song whose hook I had to unravel. I had similar experiences with its proper first single “No Rest for the Wicked” and, now, the full album. As spring starts to tease the arrival of summer, and suddenly it seems that all our collective spirits are lifting a little bit, I’m spending much of my time drowning myself in the year’s saddest collection of torch songs.

What is it about the “sadthem” that keeps me coming back?

I use “sadthem” (my homemade term for “sadness anthem”) to describe songs that manage to sound strangely powerful and inspiring despite the material and performance thereof being soaked in tragedy. I Never Learn is perhaps the year’s best sadthem collection, but not all sadthems need to be as barely-bearable as Li’s: Adele’s 21 fits the sadthem bill, but thanks to her vocal power and some intense production, the songs suggest as many fist-pumps as they do teardrops. So it’s fair to say that sadthems exist on a spectrum from the hopeful to the hopeless.

So far, 2014 has been a pretty great year for sadthems. Joining Li on the “oh god, this is heavy” end of things is Sun Kill Moon’s Benji, a stirringly beautiful album almost entirely preoccupied with death. EMA’s The Future’s Void contains a number of heartbreakers about the perils of life in the digital age. Angel Olsen’s Burn Your Fire for No Witness contains my perhaps my favourite sad song of the year, opening track “Unfucktheworld.” Then there’s Katy B’s “Crying for No Reason,” the closest thing this year has offered to a redemptive Robyn/Adele-style sadthem; the track flirts with the dance floor but, ultimately, stays sad and on the sidelines.

I’ve always been drawn to sad songs, despite the fact that most people would probably consider me a rather cheerful (if a bit cynical) person. This is hardly uncommon, I’m sure, but I’ve discovered it’s far from universal. One of my university professors regularly pestered me during my undergrad about how I could listen to those “sad-sacks” in Radiohead when I seemed like such an upbeat guy. (This was back before the band’s music was more emotionally direct and less abstract.) I have friends who openly and readily admit to avoiding sad music because it reminds them of feelings they’d prefer to avoid, choosing spend their time instead with music that amplifies more “positive” moods.

I was also struck by a pair of exchanges on Twitter/Facebook the other week involving my friend Adam and I: we both recommended “music for Mondays” to our friends/followers but while he chose the (awesome) new Ariel Grande song, “Problem” (“Listen to this song because Summer is coming and Mondays are a drag”), I went with I Never Learn (“It’s Monday, you’re probably already a little sad, so double down and listen to the heartbreaking new Lykke Li record”). What was it that led me to suggest doubling down? Why did I choose to recommend the sadthem first?

A study by a group of researchers from Japan, published last year in Frontiers in Emotion Science, offers some insight into our attraction towards sad music. They had individuals listen to minor-key classical music and communicate their emotional responses. One trend that emerged in the study is “sweet anticipation”: we expect to be sad when we listen to a song pre-identified as sad (or starts out sounding that way) so we feel satisfied, on some level, when that comes to fruition. Another trend suggested that because we associate sadness with romance and wistfulness, those positive emotions sneak into the listening experience. Finally, there’s the idea of experience simulation: sad songs allow us to experience sadness in a safe, non-threatening way.

These answers are all both convincing and underwhelming. They’re similar to the arguments often made relating to other so-called “negative” emotional experiences (like watching horror movies) but there’s something unsatisfying in their reducing our reactions to art to very basic, biological reactions. They don’t reflect my own cultured experience of artistic engagement/consumption, and leave me feeling like half of the story is missing.

Perhaps looking at music from the exact opposite end of the emotional spectrum might offer some clues. And I think I know just the song.

This will surprise no one who knows me, but I’m not the biggest fan of Pharrell Williams’ “Happy.”

I can’t bring myself to hate the song outright; Williams is just too good at what he does, even he’s starting to sound a bit formulaic on the track (and much of GIRL, for that matter). The song has connected with a lot of people — it’s the year’s biggest hit by a good margin — so it’s clearly doing something right by the semi-righteous rules of pop. But there things “Happy” does that just grind my gears, all of which I’m sure sound petty but which hit at some pretty core ideas about my emotional relationship with pop music:

The phrasing of “HAP-EEEEE”: The gospel-inspired backup vocals that do a lot of the heavy lifting on “Happy” draw out the song’s title, dramatically emphasizing the “eeeee” sound. The phrasing gives the song a juvenile feel; think of the way a three-year-old says “happy,” loud and long and delivered with toothy-grinned smile. This leads the song to feel like a play to the false nostalgia of youth, to the idea of simpler emotional time full of carefree, inhibition-free, worry-free fun — a wistfulness that’s always felt like an emotional dead-end to me, especially when it suggests (as I feel “Happy” does) that sentiment is readily attainable by sheer will.

“Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth”: This is, by a good margin, “Happy’s” most memorable line and every time I hear it, it makes me cranky. (Clearly, I’m not the target audience for this song.) Really? Happiness is the truth? Such a statement suggests that there is more truth in happy songs than there are in sad songs, or angry songs, or anything else. But maybe Pharrell means “truth” in a higher, capital-T sense: is he suggesting that we’re supposed to worship happiness? I’m on-board with happiness as a goal to strive for, but I’m not exactly going to get down on my knees before its alter.

No conflict: I like my pop songs with stakes, with some sense of conflict or neediness therein. Even a song about going dancing at a club can connect with me if there’s some sense of why these people need to dance, what experiences they’re escaping from or looking to transcend. “Happy” offers not conflict, no struggle; “can’t nothing bring me down” is the closest it gets. In some ways, this might explain its appeal: the song isn’t a story, and offers up no characters. It’s a narrative blank slate, a “feeling” that’s simple, efficient and easy to adopt as a soundtrack. It’s emotion as product, as a consumable item.

…but is it really that much more of an emotional product than Li’s sadness?

Of course, what distinguishes I Never Learn from “Happy” is that sense of conflict and character: as opposed to a blank slate, you feel like you’re right there next to woman at war with herself, caught in an emotional spiral and struggling to come to terms with the consequences of her actions. You really get the sense that Li is truly “making love to her demons,” as she put it in a Pitchfork interview recently. So there are certainly some reasonable explanations as to why I Never Learn is just the sort of melodic pop that buries itself a bit deeper under my skin.

But I worry that my preference is also due to a bias that’s perhaps somewhat less sustainable under scrutiny: a distrust of uncompromised happiness. Growing up in the digital multimedia age has embedded a certain degree of media cynicism in me, along with a predilection to pick apart marketing messages (something that’s only grown as I began working in communications). And as lifestyle marketing replaces product marketing — selling not the product, but how it fits into your life — happiness, itself, becomes the product. Buy this, be happy. Do this, be happy.

Is it any wonder then, against this backdrop, that I find the cultural portrayal of happiness less “real” than sadness? That I find more truth in Lykke Li’s heartache than in Pharrell’s celebration? I can’t escape the feeling that the only “truth” in Pharrell’s “Happy” is that it’s second away from asking me to buy something, that there’s a fancy new car I “need” just around the bend.

But I Never Learn, ultimately, is still a product. I listen to it the exact same way that I do “Happy.” Heck, the other morning, on my walk to work, both “Happy” and “Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone” shuffled through my iPhone as I listened to my “Songs of 2014” compendium playlist. I listen to it, and pay money for it, because it pings some sort of emotional response in me. What if my preference towards the sadthem is every bit as self-interested, as product-oriented, as the millions who love “Happy”? What if sadness is, simply, another feeling for me to buy into?

That thought leaves me a bit cold, and from a distance it makes me reconsider my esteem for I Never Learn. But then I put on the record for another listen and, lost in its misery, it sounds like truth once again.

]]>https://mcnutt.wordpress.com/2014/05/12/making-love-to-my-demons-on-lykke-li-pharrell-and-the-truth-behind-sad-songs/feed/1lykke1Mcnuttsadmusicpharrell1lykke2Fighting the false fierce urgency of “now”https://mcnutt.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/fighting-the-false-fierce-urgency-of-now/
https://mcnutt.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/fighting-the-false-fierce-urgency-of-now/#respondMon, 20 Jan 2014 13:31:10 +0000http://mcnutt.wordpress.com/?p=6139]]>“What’s so great about discovery? It’s a violent, penetrative act that scars what it explores. What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world.” — Jeff Goldblum as the charmingly blunt Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

Last month, Charlottetown’s Two Hours Traffic called it quits. There was no drama to speak of, just an acknowledgement that the guitar-pop band had run its course — and that, well, it just wasn’t successful enough for its members to justify devoting their lives to it. It’s not an uncommon story and, given that the band had a solid 12-year run, it shouldn’t really be that sad a story either.

I was at the band’s final Halifax show, assigned to review it for Exclaim! I expected to enjoy the concert, and I did: the band played great, the crowd was energetic and the setlist contained pretty much anything you’d have wanted to hear played. What I didn’t expect was that I’d still be thinking about the show a month later, and that I’d be listening to the band’s records — particularly its breakthrough, 2007’s Little Jabs — on near-constant rotation.

My review captures some of what I’m still feeling about the show: a sense of too-late rediscovery, a lingering sadness about lost possibility and, most importantly, some personal guilt that I hadn’t done more on my part to help this band get the attention it rightly deserved. Revisiting Little Jabs, and I have no qualms acknowledging it as easily one the best rock records to come out of Atlantic Canada in the past decade (maybe even the best). The hooks are incredible, the lyrics sharp and simple, and the melodies endlessly hummable. And while last year’s Foolish Blood isn’t quite at the same level, it’s not that far off, all things considered.

So where did Two Hours Traffic lose us? Was Little Jabs just too underrated? Maybe, but it was Polaris shortlisted and the band’s current fanbase was built on its strengths. Was it Territory, the good-but-not-as-great followup album? Maybe, but it’s really not enough of a quality drop to derail a career. Was it the lack of a hit single? Sure, that’s a contender, but that’s not always make-or-break for a band.

No, basically, we just lost interest in Two Hours Traffic. They were a really good band that ended up making a truly great album, and then proceeded to record a bunch of really good songs across two more pretty good albums. Put together, in a single show, the song catalogue floored me, but the band just wasn’t able to keep our interest over time.

We discovered Two Hours Traffic, and then tossed the band aside. And now, that’s our loss.

When I started writing about music semi-professionally, my biggest concern was the degree to which I could be critical about bands that I enjoy. I was scared of over-valuing the familiar, ending up the type of writer who enjoys more of the same, or who perhaps gives too much benefit of the doubt to artists who’ve impressed me in the past. (I’ll leave it to you to judge whether that ended up the case.)

These days, though, I’m more concerned about the opposite: of over-valuing novelty, of prioritizing the thrill of discovery.

Back in December, I wrote about year-end lists, calling them into question by looking at how the Internet has seemingly ramped up the pace of music culture:

…the Internet has amplified and accelerated popular music’s hyper-commitment to now. The entire promise of pop is the now, after all: building a world in 3-4 minutes that comes down to one chord, one choice, one feeling right now in front of you. The Internet is the same way, just with different tools: breaking news, latest tweets, “most recent” Facebook posts. Current music culture and the Internet itself, intertwined, both value the hyper-present. This means a music culture based on an endless stream of now-ness

The Internet is one big “now” machine. It feeds us a never-ending present, full of alternate paths and possibilities to consider. In musical terms, this means there’s always another great record to devote your time to, another impressive song to sneak its way into your life, and services like Spotify and Rdio (not to mention YouTube) that make it easier to access that music than ever before. Today, thanks in no small part to Rdio, I listen to more records than at any other point in my life, but I worry about how few of them linger, how few of them burrow under my skin in the way that albums did when I was 20 or 25.

Some of this is on me. Understandably, we all hold tight to records from our formative years, and there’s no question that my tastes have taken a turn towards more immediate pop sensibilities in the past couple of years. But I also look back at the 2000s and see a landscape littered with “buzz bands” that the culture machine championed and quickly grew tired of. In some cases, these were bands that never quite followed up their great debut albums (Bloc Party, Interpol, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah) with anything as compelling, living up to the old cliché about having your whole career to write your first record. In other cases, though, there are bands that embodied a moment in time and time moved on — say, for example, the Strokes.

But here’s the thing: increasingly, I find myself unconvinced these bands get that much objectively worse over the course of their careers. Instead, perhaps what’s lacking in those later records is the act of discovery, the kinetic thrill that comes from finding something new and exciting. There’s something incredibly powerful about coming across a great new band and getting to figure out how they might fit into your life, not unlike getting to know a new friend or sparking a new relationship. And, frankly, that’s not an Internet thing — it’s always been that way with music.

Now, though, that sentiment exists in a world where the possibility of discovery is everywhere, and where the potential of something else is endlessly accessible. And I worry that effect on our relationships with bands.

Admittedly, I worry about its effect on our relationships more generally.

I spent my Sunday afternoon at Podcamp Halifax, my sixth year attending the annual event. The “unconference” is all about social media and Internet issues/topics, and while I originally started attending out of professional interest, now it’s more about the “camp” side of the equation for me: a fun day with people from Halifax that I know mostly from the Internet to talk about digital life (or, as it increasingly seems, simply “life.”)

Along those lines, the sessions I tend to enjoy aren’t the practical “how to do X in social media” but the ones that are more about Internet culture in general. My favourite was by Andrew Burke, a local developer and the mind behind the parody site “Starships Start Here,” a delightful spin on Nova Scotia’s famous shipbuilding marketing campaign. Andrew, a most generous speaker, developed an app called “Remembary,” which combines diary writing with other forms of social media activity to create an ongoing journal. His presentation was about the implications of trying to document our lives for the long-term when everything about the Internet is so immediate.

It resonated with me because it got me thinking about my own biases towards novelty. Despite being a rather private person in many ways, in recent months I’ve been coming to terms with the fact that I’m predominantly an extrovert. I’m the person who almost always says “yes” when asked to hang out, simply because there’s more possibility at play — I know exactly what happens if I stick by myself, whereas I love the small surprises that come out in a shared adventure or conversation.

“There’s something happening somewhere,” a certain New Jersey icon once sang. The problem with social media is that it turns that “something” and “somewhere” into tangible, knowable things. Choosing to spend a night in means you get to see, in real time, what all your friends are up to. On a night out, you can check your phone and see how others are doing, from the better to the worse. You can keep tabs on old friends, ex-lovers and all sorts of others, weaving together alternate plots in your head. “The digital age is sparks of connection,” I (pretentiously) tweeted during the session, “constantly bouncing against our synapses, tickling our fingers to refresh one more time.”

Andrew’s point was that, in some ways, this can be deeply unsatisfying: not only do you run out of interactions when your feed is done, and feel the need to refresh until something new hits, but the entire experience places the opportunity costs of your choices right in front of you. It’s a false fierce urgency of “now”: you can’t really embrace all these possibilities, but you’re privy to them anyways, hundreds of little discoveries, each hinting at larger discoveries if you had the wherewithal to follow through with them. You see, in real time, small glimpses into what else you could be doing, or reading — or listening to.

You can’t do everything, be everywhere, or listen to all of the things. But sometimes, Internet life can make you feel like you should, and feel guilty when you don’t. So you try and keep up, keep pace, bounce from opportunity to opportunity… until you end up at your last Two Hours Traffic show and feel guilty about what got left behind in the name of discovery.